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autolenaphilia · 1 year

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Transandrophobia isn’t real because misandry isn’t real. This is the basic truth of the matter.

The very structure of the word implies some kind of intersection of transphobia and misandry, which is impossible, because again misandry doesn’t exist. The phrase “transandrophobia” exists as a transmasc counterpart to transmisogyny, and it doesn’t work, because while misogyny is real, misandry/androphobia is not. The things that are described as “transandrophobia” which are actual instances of oppression are better explained as plain transphobia.

The antifeminism of transandrophobia theory

“Transandrophobia” theory often launders antifeminist concepts of misandry. Of course this is openly often denied. The defense is that transandrophobia doesn’t imply that misandry exists, but only describes transphobia directed at transmascs.

And it’s often disingenuous. I’ve come across numerous transandrophobia blogs that clearly believe in misandry. The very coiner of the word, says it’s caused by “the effects of irrational fears of masculinity and manhood“ (taking “androphobia” quite literally) which implies both the existence of misandry and also misogynistically dismissing women’s fears of men’s violence as irrational.

Of course they change the language around, using euphemisms for misandry. In fact transandrophobia is a clear evolution of the term “transmisandry.” Genderkoolaid and ey’s idea of “anti-masculism” that I criticized here is maybe the most obvious example of that on tumblr today.. The belief in some kind of systemic force that “negatively impacts men and masculine people on the basis of their manhood and/or masculinity.“ to quote genderkoolaid is as succinct a definition of misandry theory as any. And ey even outright admits that “antimasculism” is just another word for misandry. Other transandrophobia bloggers like the transunity blog outright use the word “misandry.”So for simplicity’s sake, I’m going to use “misandry” for whatever euphemisms transandrophobia people use, like “antimasculism”, “androphobia” or claims that “society hates men” or “there is a widespread irrational fear of men and masculinity.”

The use of feminist language like “patriarchy” common among transandrophobia people is either severely confused or outright dishonest. It’s a symptom of the terrible understanding of feminism on this site, as I lamented before. Patriarchy as a term that inherently implies male privilege, men are privileged for being men, not disadvantaged. Claiming the patriarchy oppresses men on the basis of their gender is a contradiction in terms. And belief in misandry is inherently misogynistic and anti-feminist.

How terms for systemic oppression actually work

Let’s however assume that the word “transandrophobia” just means “transphobia aimed at transmascs.” Then I don’t see why this word needs to exist. It contradicts most academic work on systemic oppression. New terms are generally not made just to describe “specific experiences of an oppression”. Instead they are created to describe meaningful intersections of different forms of oppression. Often these are intersections with misogyny, because that particular oppression affects about half the population. So misogynynoir describes an intersection of anti-blackness/racism and misogyny that black women experience, and lesbophobia describes an intersection of homophobia and misogyny that lesbians experience. And transmisogyny describes an intersection of misogyny and transphobia that trans women and transfems experience.

The lesbophobia example is especially pertinent to this discussion. The homophobia that gay men experience is often distinct from that lesbians experience, and homophobia against gay men is no minor prejudice, gay men have literally been murdered for being gay. Yet there is no “homoandrophobia” (to borrow an argument from this post by catgirlforeskin) and that’s because misandry/androphobia isn’t real. Men experience systemic oppression differently from women experiencing the same oppression, but that’s because of the absence of misogyny, not the existence of any misandry.

So a word like transandrophobia does imply an intersection between “androphobia/misandry”and transphobia. Otherwise it doesn’t have much reason to exist.

Misandry must affect all men in order to exist

I have seen claims that while “cis misandry” doesn’t exist, trans men and transmasc people are in fact oppressed for being men or masculine. And that’s how transandrophobia works

But that’s just transphobia. Misandry can only be real if it affects all men. Misogyny is a viable term because all women are oppressed for being women, even if they can also be privileged because of things like being cis, wealthy or white which balances out their oppression for being women (intersectionality is complex). I wouldn’t claim misogyny was real if it only affected a subset of women.

You can’t claim that men are oppressed for being men or being masculine, that it is some stigmatized gender or gender expression, when being a man and specifically a masculine man is what is expected of about half the population, and in fact men gain privilege for the successful performance of masculinity.

It’s true that trans men and other transmascs are systemically oppressed, and do indeed experience severe pushback if they express their manhood or try to transition in a transmasculine direction. But that’s because they are trans. Transfems experience a similar oppression for expressing their womanhood or trying to transition in transfeminine direction. That’s why the word transphobia exists.

Let’s make an example of a common bit of rhetoric among transandrophobia people, and see how it is all explained entirely by transphobia. Transandrophobia people talk about some general “hatred of testosterone” as part of transandrophobia, often dishonestly conflating transfems expressing their dysphoria with transphobic rhetoric about how testosterone ruins transmasc bodies.

But any idea about society hating testosterone fail to account for why the testosterone flowing through bodies deemed naturally male is seen as okay. In fact being “high-t” is seen as a positive in a man. It’s not even a prejudice against medical testosterone, being “low-t” is a fad disorder that cis men can easily get testosterone prescriptions for. And trying to lower your “natural testosterone” levels is something that’s actively hindered and gatekept, something I’ve experienced. I waited three years to get on t-blockers due to medical gatekeeping. In my country Sweden getting your balls removed legally and thus permanently lower your t-levels is something you have to petition the government for, something I’m trying to do.

Any kind of theorizing about a misandristic hatred of testosterone can’t explain this. It’s only so-called “cross-sex hormones” that are seen as bad, not testosterone in itself. And this is entirely explained by transphobia, not misandry.

It’s of course true that men are oppressed, but it’s never on the basis of being men. People who try to argue for misandry often use (often appropriatively) the struggles of oppressed men and try to argue they are oppressed because they are men. And transandrophobia theory is no different.

“Deserving a word”

The attitude among the transmascs who support transandrophobia theory seems to be “transfems have transmisogyny to describe their oppression, we deserve a word too.” Except again, transfems don’t have the term transmisogyny because we are very special girls who need a special word for our oppression, it exists because it describes the intersection of misogyny and transphobia we experience. It exists for the same reason as lesbophobia does, to describe an intersection between misogyny and another oppression. Gay men are not disadvantaged compared to lesbians because they “only” have the more general term “homophobia” while lesbians have the more specific word “lesbophobia.” And I don’t think transmascs would be disadvantaged if nobody accepted transandrophobia as a tern for their experiences.

You don’t need a specific word to talk about your experiences with transphobia, just as gay men don’t need a world like lesbophobia to talk about their experiences with homophobia. You can just talk about them, and use the word “transphobia” as a label for it.

And sometimes acknowledging that our experiences of oppression can be similar is useful for solidarity and community building. All trans people are negatively affected by transphobia, and that is the real “transunity.” theory.

Don’t end up like nothorses who once unironically listed “Misgendering over the phone,“ as an example of transandrophobia/transphobia only affecting transmascs.

Words exist in a context

Transandrophobia clearly exists as some transmasc counterpart to the transfem transmisogyny. It was even more obvious when the word was “transmisandry.” Words always exist in a context, and is often built by binaries. How someone who believes it defines transandrophobia does say a lot about how they define transmisogyny.

I’ve already described how if transandrophobia merely means “transmascs specific experiences with transphobia” it doesn’t have much reason to exist. But it also by implication diminishes and reduces transmisogyny. If transandrophobia only means “the transphobia experienced by transmasculine people”, transmisogyny is reduced by implication to only meaning “transphobia experienced by transfeminine people.” It’s another symptom of how tumblr discourse is uninterested in acknowledging misogyny, and in this case that misogyny is intersecting with transphobia in transmisogyny.

And well, if transmisogyny means “an intersection between transphobia and misogyny experienced by transfems” it does imply that transandrophobia also should describe an intersection, for why else does it exist. And we are back to it describing an imaginary intersection between transphobia and misandry, a misogynistic and antifeminist idea.

Who gets to define their own oppression?

Of course I am a trans woman, and I will of course get accused of hating transmascs, and robbing them of their ability to define their own oppression.

I would be more sympathetic to this argument, if transandrophobia theorists didn’t keep on constantly defining transmisogyny as the result of misandry. It is common in these circles for transmascs to reject any tme/tma distinction too. Literally going “I got mistaken for a trans woman once, that means I’m affected by transmisogyny.” There is absolutely zero respecting transfems rights to define their own oppression in transandrophobia circles, so why should I respect theirs?

Seriously, the “transmisogyny is actually misandry” claim just keeps happening. Genderkoolaid did it, the transunity blog too, and this dude who I literally found by browsing the “transmisogyny” tag spewing his misandry nonsense.

The problem with “transmisogyny is misandry, actually” is that misandry isn’t real, men are privileged for being men. Transfems experience oppression because we reject being men and performing masculinity. Men are in fact our oppressor class. When transmisogynists talk derisively about “men who wear dresses and say they are women”, they aren’t saying that being a man is bad (in fact they are often men themselves), it’s that “being amab and rejecting masculinity and manhood and claiming to be a woman is bad.” Its an intersection of transphobia and misogyny.

“Transandrophobia” is seldom just talking about the difficulties of being transmasc, it wants to redefine how transfems think about their oppression as well. And it does so in misgendering and transmisogynistic ways.

The transandrophobia theorists generally ignore the existence of transmisogyny, especially in queer communities. In fact it often implies or outright states that transfems are privileged in the trans/queer communities for being women or feminine, which is bizarre. In reality, Transmisogyny is rife in queer spaces, with “crazy trans woman syndrome” being common.

And it’s not like transandrophobia discourse is immune to that particular syndrome. Transmisogyny-exempt privilege dynamics remain very much in play. Transfems tend to get accused of being transandrophobic. The accusations are framed as “lateral aggression” not oppression, although the tone of these posts suggests “lateral aggression” is another polite euphemism word swap game like misandry for “androphobia.”

It feels like the antifeminist, and specifically anti-transfeminist roots of the whole transandrophobia idea coming to the forefront.

#my writings #transmisogyny #misandry is not real

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probablyasocialecologist · 1 year

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Approved by the Atlanta City Council in 2021, the plan has been met with months-long opposition from neighbors and protesters concerned with the destruction of the forest at a time of intensifying climate change and environmental racism. Protesters are also alarmed by the expansion of policing and its associated violence, and “Stop Cop City” has become a national rallying cry for environmental and racial justice movements. Law enforcement, in turn, has responded with a ferocious crackdown that has left one forest defender killed (Georgia state troopers riddled 26-year-old Manuel “Tortuguita” Terán with 57 bullets in January) and 42 charged with domestic terrorism. Three organizers with the Atlanta Solidarity Fund, a bail fund, are now facing money laundering and charity fraud charges, following SWAT arrests at the end of May.

[...]

Some union leaders say the fight to stop Cop City has significant stakes for the labor movement as a whole. “Working people always have to be wary of any repression against protesters, because there is a history in our country that once it’s used against anyone protesting government policies, it can be turned against workers in their union,” Carl Rosen, the general president of UE, says over the phone from Erie, Pennsylvania, where 1,400 UE members who work for Wabtec Corp. could soon go out on strike.

[...]

“Cops are the first line of defense for business owners and employers, so I think it makes sense for labor to be opposed to Cop City,” he says. “These cops are being trained at Cop City and will use the tactics they learn to crush our strike if we go out.”

#tortuguita #cop city #atlanta #unions #police #emphasis added

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drdemonprince · 7 months

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Love your recent post about making it too socially costly to be a genocide denier. But I'm curious about how this squares with your previous statements about how we shouldn't do that with COVID eugenics? Maybe I didn't understand you, but I got the impression that your position there is that using social shame (i.e. making the behavior too socially costly) to get people to stop wantonly exposing others to COVID (i.e., participating in eugenics) is wrong and/or ineffective. (Point of clarification: I'm not talking about shaming people for needing to socialize; I'm more talking about shaming people for refusing to mask on public transit and other places that disabled people don't get a choice about being in.) Or maybe you weren't referencing social shame re: genocide and I misunderstood that post?

Thanks for your question. I trust that you can see that addressing a public health crisis that affects everyone and was caused by institutional failure is quite different from addressing a genocide caused by an ethnonationalist group and that only targets one population. But I will explain how:

With a public health issue like COVID, the target is behavior change for both the individual and society's sake. You want your COVID-denier uncle to wear a mask for both himself and others, but the TV and the government has lied to him about masks not working and COVID being over. You cannot shame a person into positive behavioral change; decades of empirical public health research attests to that. You can't shame someone into wearing a mask, you can't shame someone into wearing a condom, and you can't shame someone into not smoking. If they feel the pressure to hide their actual behaviors, matters only get worse. You need education, financial incentives, and positive social incentives, not punishment.

But defeating a genocide is a question not of changing individual opinions, but rather completely upending the existing structures of power. There is no debating a fascist; fascism thrives on being exposed and laundered to the public through debate, and it cares not about facts or appeals to humanity, even one's own fleeting mortality. Fascism is a death cult created by powerful people and a powerful state. We don't debate genocide apologists in order to defeat them; we silence them, drive them away, exclude them, take away their power, and strike them, hard, until they do not exist within a position of power at all.

We didn't politely debate other people to convince them to stop using racial slurs, either, for instance. We made it so incredibly shameful and costly to use words like that, so that dedicated racists are afraid to do their racism in public. We want genocide apologists to be terrified to do what they do in public, because it is public normalization of their beliefs that allows them to thrive. That is very, very different from, say, educating a person who simply is not aware that a word is offensive, or is not aware of a history. We still push them to our desired position with strong unequivocal messaging, though, because the alternative is dangerous and morally unacceptable.

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blorbocedes · 11 months

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this is just curiosity, not hate or anything like that. pls feel free to ignore if not comfortable answering. i understand you’re a max fan. however max is very controversial and has done some very controversial things e.g defending nelson piquet using a racial slur against lewis and even yesterday he declined to do interviews due to boo’s etc but said it was a normal thing in sport when it happened to lewis. i know max & lewis’ relationship is basically non existent & a hard one lmao, and this is maybe just tit for tat, so perhaps these are bad examples to use but does stuff like that make it hard to like max or it’s easy to excuse his behaviour? again not hate just max fans make me curious lol

every driver has done controversial things...... I do not care if max gets booed or if he skips an interview. every driver gets booed, esp if you're the winner, it is a part of the sport. seb got booed, michael, lewis, nico, max

I mean, assuming you are a lewis fan so does lewis hanging out and vacationing with known sexual abusers (jared leto, shaun white, ansel elgort, to name a few, leto and white who he spent new years' in Antarctica with) make it hard to like lewis or excuse his behavior?

there is no perfect Angel in the oil guzzling money laundering sport. 🤷

I think it's fine if you hate max or have different boundaries/standards/moral objections or just don't like him.

but the moral purity of the way some people behave that if you like max = you condone racism is a reach, cause people don't think you like seb = you believe in sexually objectifying female reporters in a male dominated sport without public apology as long as you later rebrand into a feminist girldad.

you don't need to agree with everything a driver you're a fan of does, this is accepted by most fans except when it comes to macks.

#answering in good faith #mv1 #blorbocedes ask #f1 discourse

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odinsblog · 8 months

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I hate sellouts with a passion, but I try to remember something I once read:

“Every minority and every people has its share of opportunists, profiteers, freeloaders and escapists. The hammer blows of discrimination, poverty and segregation must warp and corrupt some. No one can pretend that because a people may be oppressed, every individual member is virtuous and worthy. The real issue is whether in the great mass the dominant characteristics are decency, honor and courage.”

—Martin Luther King Jr., Why We Can't Wait, 1968

Anyway, this may be old news for some of us, but definitely not for all of us. Salute to all of the Black and Brown people with morals and heart, who don’t sellout, even though the overwhelming majority of us could easily get rich quick (if we were sellouts). 🫡

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stick-ball · 7 months

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Hi! I'm about to end my whole career!

Here goes the Riko rant that dear @capcavan asked, demanded and begged for.

You know, I get it.

So here's the thing. I get it, Riko sucks. He is the bad guy we all got hung upon. Why? Because he is a rival for our protagonist. He is an angsty, young guy, born into wealth that came from money laundering and human trafficking. It's despicable, the Ravens are bullies and he himself makes lots of bad things happen. Yeah sure, I get that, whatever.

Being raised as a superstar must've been really, really difficult for you.

But I want to really dig deeper right now, this is a Riko rant after all, and you need to really know your fighters. So, to start: a huge trap in toxic families is that the children, even when grown up, will refuse to identify their parents and guardians as negative and toxic people. Not even outside influence can really sway them, usually. Kids that get away from a sinister situation can later tell they were abused, that it wasn't right, but still, they don't get the specifics of what and why, and they are doomed to repeat the same abuse and call it good. Call it right. And sometimes that's substance abuse, sometimes thats domestic abuse, sometimes that's racism and sexism and xenophobia they will grow into believing as the way the world works. Sometimes, thats nepotism and sadism. Only thing that can help is therapy and an environment removed from the control of the original abuse, lots of therapy, lots of space, years of it. A perfect case of a typical toxic family is Aaron.

A perfect case of that could also be Riko.

And here you can call bullshit because Neil had such a fucked up, abusive father and he *knew* it was wrong. Yes, he knew it was wrong for his father to hurt him to the measure he went. Why? Because his mother protected him, because his mother feared his father, not adored him. Because his mother took him away and kept running. A mother, a role model a child feels very strongly about, subconsciously.

Riko was taken from his mother. He was pushed aside by his father and left in the care of a family member, who was easy to glorify for an impressionable child. Because he was a legend. In fanon I often see Tetsuji's character taking a very background role in everything, and sure, he seems pretty background to Neil, because every bad guy seems background to Neil in comparison to his Father - besides Riko, who is the one dangling that threat in front of him. Tetsuji just wants his property back, Riko is playing with fire though. So yeah to us, reading the story, Tetsuji is a total asshole among many such men in the book.

But to Riko he must've meant almost everything for a long time. A crucial thing about Tetsuji is, he is a sadist. Oh sure, sorry, it's only called sadism when done against his team, right? Against Jean or Kevin or Neil? When it comes to Riko, who was in his care for all of his formative years, it was just strict childbearing right? He is a Moriyama after all, so he is evil from birth.

Yeah, I must've mixed something up about Riko being beaten to unconsciousness several times being mentioned in extra content. You think that was a one, two, third times the charm occurance?

Always a commodity, never a human being, not a single person in your family thinking you’re worth a damn off the court— yeah, sounds rough.

I always wondered how sarcastic Neil was saying this. I mean, he definitely meant to land a punch where it would hurt. And he actually knew Riko as a little kid, so he knew more than most.

Stockholm syndrome is very common among victims of childhood abuse. I would know, anyway. It's like the most logical option - the survivior is living in a dual reality. These people are my family, the care for me. They provide for me. They want me to be the best. They also abuse me. They hurt me, but it's for the best. Hurting me is a expression of love. I am grateful to them.

I often wonder how many people who read the books know what a commodity is. A commodity, in the most basic terms, is a basic good that can be used in ccommerce to interchange with goods of the same type. A commodity is not a king, or a queen, or a bishop or a knight, or even a rook. It's a fucking pawn. It's cannon fodder.

Riko is worthless to his family. Riko is just a tool to Tetsuji to generate profit. Riko wants to be worthy to his family. Riko most likely loves his uncle and is ready to do the most insane thing if only it gives him the one thing he desires, which is being seen as worthy by his family.

Kevin and I talk about your intricate and endless daddy issues all the time.

Then there's grooming. Grooming is more obvious when it's done by a stranger who sees the child randomly or in some intervals of time. It's much harder to resist when it's constant. To Riko, Tetsuji is a good person, he is a hero, he is his family, he cares for him, they have a common goal. Riko wants to be what Tetsuji wants him to be. There is a price to pay for it, of course. There is a price for everything. But the price doesn't matter. Riko wants to pay the price he has to pay, to be what Tetsuji wants him to be.

And the thing is, do you think Riko learned how to use his money and crime connections to control others? How to gain power through fear and pain? You think spending his whole life locked in a fucking stadium he taught it to himself how to break people in body and spirit? That torturing them was his special interest? Or maybe are you forgetting that amongst valid responces to trauma, besides fight, flight and freeze there is also fawn? Don't you think it's much more likely, being groomed and enamoured with his captor (bcs thats what Tetsuji is to me, their captor) he impersonated him to the best of his ability? That he learned every leaf in the book from him, because he was his only connection to the family, to his father, to his brother. He was a legend, the creator of exy. Wasn't he always trying to be worthy of him? To be good enough to be loved and wanted? To be great full enough?

I am not saying this absolves him of any of the things he did, but people do insane things under lesser influence, things they would never do otherwise. And I am not talking of people groomed from early childhood, I'm talking of sane adults, being dragged into dangerous and destructive ideologies.

I know it’s not entirely your fault that you are mentally unbalanced and infected with these delusions of grandeur, and I know you’re physically incapable of holding a decent conversation with anyone like every other normal human being can, but I don’t think any of us should have to put up with this much of your bullshit.

Because it isn't, is it? The things HE does ARE his fault, definately. But the reason why? That is not that easy to pinpoint. And Riko is so unstable it hurts. He is so far removed from real life he is completely incapable of conversation. He is a child brought up in a grave, but...

Pity only gets you so many concessions, and you used yours up about six insults ago.

To me Riko is besides all other things, wasted potential. All the things he dreamed of? He could have had them. He was talented, he was determined and had a lot of courage, but all of that was utterly wasted in the violence and malice he was soaked in. In all the violence and malice he created in return.

So please, please, just shut the fuck up and leave us alone.

The most interesting thing about All for the game though is, that in every other book Riko dying would've been the big bad wolf being defeated. But here, that's just a bleep on the radar. Because Riko was a product, not the producer. What I love about All for the game is it shows none of the madness and evil in life started or ended with me or you, with Riko or Neil. Not even with Keylight or Tetsuji. Fuck it did not even end with Nathan dying. It all ends how it begun. With a deal with the devil made in the back of a car, bought with blood money.

#i said what i said and you can cry about it #no vacuum storylines here thank you good-night l #this one is gonna make me so popular with enemies of the state i can feel it #riko moriyama #riko moriyama headcanon #aftg #all for the game #tfc #the foxhole court #aftg headcanon #aftg rant #trauma discussion

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eretzyisrael · 15 days

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by Amelie Botbol

Pretoria serves as a “crucial base of operations” for Islamic terror groups, according to a soon-to-be released report by the Institute for the Study of Global Antisemitism and Policy.

The report’s publication comes in the wake of the International Court of Justice’s latest ruling against Israel’s military offensive in Rafah, in a case brought before the court by South Africa.

On Friday, the court ruled by 13 to 2 that the Jewish state must “immediately halt its military offensive, and any other action in the Rafah Governorate, which may inflict on the Palestinian group in Gaza conditions of life that could bring about its physical destruction in whole or in part.”

“The ICJ’s ruling is a stark reminder that South Africa has become a hub for extremist activities across the African continent,” said ISGAP Executive Director Charles Asher Small.

“South Africa embraces antisemitic ideologies, supports state-sponsored terror, maintains close ties with and acts on behalf of Iran, Qatar and Hamas,” he added.

According to ISGAP’s report, Pretoria serves as a “crucial base of operations for Islamic terror groups, facilitating connections with networks throughout Africa.”

The report states that “despite long-standing U.S. sanctions, international Islamist entities with terror links continue to operate freely within South Africa, evading global scrutiny.”

It argues that the “Financial Action Task Force (FATF) [which leads global action to tackle money laundering, terrorist and proliferation financing] noted South Africa’s failure to effectively identify, investigate, or prosecute terrorist financiers, revealing critical gaps in its anti-terrorism financing measures.”

Addressing Pretoria’s governing party, the report claims that “the African National Congress (ANC) maintains close relationships with Qatar, Iran and terror groups like Hamas.”

The report also highlights “the possibility that Iran funded South Africa’s ANC party in exchange for favorable outcomes in ICJ cases, especially since the ANC’s sudden financial stabilization in early January 2024, after years teetering on the brink of bankruptcy, remains shrouded in mystery and devoid of any detailed explanation.”

According to Small, “South Africa has become a leading voice for terror. By bringing this case against Israel and in favor of Hamas, South Africa further positions itself as a bad actor on the global stage.”

The time has come for the international community “to recognize and address South Africa’s alarming connections with terror-supporting states and entities,” he added.

ISGAP is an international organization that works on mapping, decoding and combatting contemporary antisemitism.

Earlier this year, Small told JNS that the South African government was acting in complete opposition with South Africa’s freedom charter and Nelson Mandela’s vision of democracy by embracing the Iranian revolutionary regime, Qatar and Hamas.

“For the ANC and the South African government of 2024, which inherited the work of Nelson Mandela, Oliver Tambo and Walter Sisulu among others who sacrificed their lives for social democracy, to be in bed with Hamas, the Iranian revolutionary regime and the Qatari Muslim Brotherhood regime is an affront to the South African people,” he said.

“For Pretoria’s ruling party, the corrupt party of 2024, to be in bed with the disciples of true apartheid, true Nazism and true racism, to invite Hamas after they committed a racist massacre based on the ideology of Nazism and Fascism of Europe, is an affront to what the ANC is supposed to represent,” he added.

#south africa #pretoria #support for terror #anc #isgap #crucial base of operations

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lesbianchemicalplant · 11 months

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there are so many uses of machine learning (and similar tech) that are actual fucking horrors. for a few quick examples,

police surveillance

surveillance and automated misidentification of CSAM on people's phones

state discrimination against disabled parents

unethical experimentation by startups on suicidal teens

denying mortgages to black people

laundering the racism of bail and prison sentencing through supposed “objectivity”

and on and on

but instead of giving a shit about those, people got whipped up into an Intellectual Property frenzy about image gen tools because their favorite Charizard Drawers screamed and whinged that Big Tech Is Stealing Their Charizards 🤪

#machine learning #my posts #ai art discourse #racism #csa mention /#csa /#police /#ableism /#ask to tag /#suicide /

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communist-ojou-sama · 4 months

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What's like the point of insisting that black people in the USA (&probably Europe but that's not what the discourse is about) don't benefit from imperialism other than feeling good? Like when they annoy bloggers for generalizing people of the USA the topic of discussion is most of the time either actions of the state itself or dominant culture. Demanding people to specify "white" is somewhat obnoxious to non-Americans, but it doesn't change the points in the slightest (sometimes it's even fair when it comes to say settler mentality, probably also when it comes to religion).

Black people constitute 13(?)% of USA population and are in fact mostly poor, so even if we completely ignore their participation in imperialism it doesn't change things, so it's not even meaningful sabotage.

I am not American so I probably don't know how it affects movements inside, but it really feels pointless.

(In fact the only people whom I saw be really offended by it are black people not from USA, so like. Also by obnoxious I meant that I saw them accuse of racism for not specifying "white Americans" people who are not white in the first place, because it feels like "you have to know the internal complexities of my country while I can not know anything about your")

I understand the well-meaning nature of this ask, so I'm going to try my best to reply in kind in the spirit of good faith. First and foremost the thing that people need to get updated on is that most black USians are not poor. Less than 20% of black people in the US live below the federal poverty line, a little over 17%. That is in fact about twice the poverty rate of White USians, and the federal poverty line certainly does not represent the increasing hardships brought upon Especially black people by the de-industrialization and precaritization of the US economy, but even adjusting for that, the fact of the matter is, most of us Are Not Poor. Poverty is widespread enough in our communities that there's almost no one among us that doesn't know someone in our family or social circle that does live in crushing poverty, but that is not the reality of Most of our day-to-day lives. And that's the thing that makes me mad, instead its the laundering of the suffering of people we See in our lives that is being used to win internet arguments and be petty bullies. Perhaps excluding the very richest Black USians, blackness is absolutely something that leaves us potentially marked for execution at any time and within the US we face constant institutional abuse and deprivation, most notably in medical settings; there's no denying we're at the rock bottom of the US's vicious and brutal racial caste system.

However, where is this reality any different for black people? If you compare the PPP-adjusted GDP per capita of Black USians to, for example, Black Ayitians, Black Jamaicans, Black Brazilians, Afro-Latinos, and indeed Black Africans, the reality is that while we're still black, we're by far the richest black community in the world, and how did we get so much richer than other Black communities? It's through our bitchass "community leaders" who have done nothing for decades but push class collaborationism and "black capitalism" in the community, collaborationism with global white-supremacist fascism, in the wake of the systematic destruction of the radical Black liberation movements of the 1960s and 1970s.

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sirfrogsworth · 6 months

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Someone mentioned that the difference between political messages in movies of the past and today is that in the past they were hidden in subtext and didn't "hit you over the head."

I'm not sure I agree with that. For one thing, in order to get certain messages into movies, the filmmakers had to be sneaky at times. They had no choice but to hide in the subtext. But that still happens a lot today as well. Steven Universe and Nimona come to mind. A lot of people completely missed the trans allegory in Nimona and Rebecca Sugar had to fight for any overt queer themes.

But also, there were plenty of older movies that hit you over the head with their messages. Star Wars may have hidden the Viet Cong = Rebel Alliance connection, but the Empire was pretty clearly a Nazi-like facist organization. Robocop and Starship Troopers come to mind—absolutley dripping with clear satire that some people still manage to miss somehow. Blazing Saddles was not subtle about its anti-racism stance.

It's a combination of what you can get away with during the time period and what you have to launder through subtext. Barbie didn't have feminist subtext because it didn't need to hide that message. But it was a very Feminism 101 overtness, and any deeper, more complicated feminist themes were still put in subtext. And many felt it didn't go nearly far enough and was too subtle still.

Film has always hit you over the head with what they are allowed to hit you over the head with and the rest is snuck in with the hopes people will pick up on the message.

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metamatar · 1 year

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'let fiction challenge you'

i do think this reaction against sanitised writing should not be valorising a vague notion of an individual experiencing a challenge. bc that is often laundered as an opposition to pleasure itself and is easily weaponised to discount what marginalised people are saying about much of the western canon. this critique has imagined this individual as some kind of perfect capitalist subject that needs fiction to shake them up, which is its own can of forms for substituting material ideological engagement with reading fiction. i found reading dh lawrence challenging bc i started to read lady chatterley's lover expecting a slutty slutty time but all i got were fascist screeds full of classism, racism, ableism, homophobia and sexism.

it would be more useful if we were interrogating what comfort is, whose comfort it is and how comfort functions in a capitalist hegemony.

#fiction #left discourse #okay saturday morning starting now no more discourse

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hussyknee · 6 months

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If y'all want to feel sympathy for the Israelis, you better have it for every single genocider. Slavers and settlers that scalped Natives and Nazis and Imperial Japan and Stalinists and Serbs and the British East India company and white nationalists and Islamic fundamentalists and Hindutvas and Assad's forces and and and.

People do not become genociders because of victimhood. The majority of the worst colonial empires were people who hadn't been oppressed themselves in centuries. Groups become genocidal because they have power and want to take their trauma or paranoia out on someone weaker than they are. Even the ones who aren't gleefully enthusiastic go along with it because the benefits and risks of dissent outweigh your moral conscience. You're not forced to make those choices. That's not what indoctination is. Indoctrination helps dehumanization. It's making it easy to silence every doubt and qualm and instinct for empathy and compassion. But you still choose. You make a conscious decision to see a human being as a vermin to be eradicated. It's easy to do that when you have no incentive to see them as human and no consequences for treating them accordingly.

For fuck's sake, stop using the Holocaust as an excuse for Zionists. Half of them are converts or the children of converts who never lived the Jewish generational legacy of persecution. Most of their families migrated from places where they had a perfectly comfortable lives, and the other half was born in Israel and never knew what being a marginalized minority was like. Israelis are literally the least oppressed Jews in the known world. They victimize Palestinians because colonizers and oppressors live in mortal fear of the people they colonize and oppress, because they KNOW that they're crushing them and have to manufacture all sorts of narratives to rationalize and justify that they're actually the good guys.

Colonization and genocide is a result of power. I and a lot of other BIPOC have been traumatized by Zionists before we ever knew the word for them, because they keep taking out their paranoia of Jewish hate on Black people, Natives, immigrants, Muslims and Arabs and every kind of racial minority that have no systemic power to hurt them. They have such a foothold in the Jewish communities of Europe and its settler colonies (Australia, the Americas), because white Jews have assimilated into whiteness. However conditional their acceptance among white Christians, they have the same racial and institutional power over Black and brown colonized people. Which makes it easy for them to choose Zionism— the legitimizing of white colonial anxiety in place of fear of their oppressor. Antisemitism is their ready and convenient way to rationalize the racism and Islamphobia and racial superiority they already have.

Do you think Jews are the only people who have ever been genocided? The Holocaust was not exceptional, it was exceptionalized by the Western powers to launder their own atrocities that far outstripped Nazi Germany. Look at what they're doing with Ukraine. They're being genocided and colonized and they deserve empathy and help against Russia. But the West isn't concerned about Armenia the same way even though it's also an Eastern European country. They definitely weren't concerned about any of the other countries Russia has attacked or helped genocide (like Syria). Including Ukraine itself before all this. Putin has been attacking Donbas since 2014.

So why now? They care about who's genociding Ukraine, not about Ukrainians. Russia under Putin is very much a threat to NATO and Ukraine is bordered by NATO countries. The Western PR machine still had to make Ukrainians white, because Slavs are ethnically marginalized in Western Europe, and even North America to a lesser degree. They have white privilege over all Asians and Africans and Indigenous people because the colour system of race is based on European colonization, but they have only conditional whiteness in the imperial sphere of both the US and Russia. But because they're ethnically European, the US and Western Europe was able to launch a PR "Look They're Just Like Us!" campaign to elevate them to full whiteness, so that their own citizens would actually give a shit about this country they'd barely heard of before. That's why we're all more concerned about Ukraine than any other Eastern Europeans (we're all conditioned into white supremacy). After that, the US went around thumping its own chest for a full year and half, trying to launder its military image after the twenty year Muslim genocide that was the War on Terror (still ongoing).

This is exactly what they did with European Jews. High-ho, somebody victimized by the Enemy! Dust them off and lookie! They're European! People will give a shit that we liberated them if we make them all white! But uh, do we really want five million Jewish refugees in here? Oh I know, we'll thrown in with those crazy Jewish terrorists that were giving the Brits so much trouble, and give them a state! They're also from Europe after all, and Civilized™, unlike the savages!

And then the liberated Jews accepted doing exactly what the Nazis did to them. Not because they had to! They could have just lived in Palestine, that whole region of the Levant was pretty secular and multicultural. But they didn't see Arabs as human beings! Because Europeans are taught to see Black and brown people as servants and savages! They massacred Palestinians and took the place over because they could and then called it the War of Independence. The first people they victimized after that? Were Arab Jews. They colluded with Arab nationalists to have them ethnically cleansed entirely out of their countries and scooped them up to create a labouring underclass! Put them up in such squalid conditions that scores died!

And did those people look around and realize white Jews were their oppressors and they had far more in common with Palestinians? No. They threw in with their oppressors to help make Palestinians lives a generational nightmare. Because power and assimilation! This is the exact same reason why Zionists has been trying to cosy up to Nazis since before Hitler.

(Oh and by the way? Germans never regretted the Nazis or the Holocaust. The Americans "denazification" was a dead fail. They just used Israel to make a whole dog and pony show of how very sorry they were and how it was a Dark Moment in Their History™ (because nothing they've ever done to colonized people counts). They paid reparations because the West made them, but they never got over the massive post-war genocide the Allies subjected their people to, or the way they carved up the country like a Christmas turkey. But again, did they hold Britain, France, US and Russia responsible for it? Did they acknowledge that the most severe cases of post-war violence came from American GIs? Of course not. Obviously the biggest threat was...the Poles.)

If you really see all those TikTok videos of families dancing to their genocide songs, taunting starving and dehydrated Palestinians and teens lampooning Palestinian mothers grieving their dead children and think "they're also victims because Western imperialists exploited their fear and made them into monsters" then I don't even know what to say to you. That level of infantilization, wilful ignorance and need to turn sadism into victimhood is breathtakingly racist and paternalistic. Even if you believe #Not All Israelis, the point is there's enough Israelis. Also what is even there to feel sorry for?? Are Israelis about to be turned out and shot in the streets? Starve to death? Have their limbs amputated without anesthetic and still die of sepsis? Literally what??

Emotions are signifiers of your own internal biases and perspectives. They aren't indicative of justice or morality. We can't move through a deeply unequal world and believe that compassion is having the same responses, judgements and feelings for everyone. It's not empathy you're feeling for Israelis, it's conditioned philosemitism and casual racism against Palestinians. If you actually followed the videos and images and news coming out of Palestine, you would feel about as sympathetic towards them as Nazis. You would understand that this kind of atrocity doesn't come from trauma or having been victims. It comes from having zero consequences for doing them. It comes from unchecked, gleeful, sadistic power.

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